It’s
easy to read this poem and feel sort of aghast. Really, Emily? You like the
agony because there is more truth in it than in the insincere smiles of the neighbors
passing by on the street? And isn’t it a bit, um, harsh or at least dismissive
to call the sweat of death agony “Beads upon the Forehead” that are strung by
“homely Anguish”?

The
dying convulsions and throes as the body gives up the battle (we’re not talking
about a quiet passing in one’s sleep here) are a badge of authenticity. And
then the capper—one cannot “feign” the glaze of death. Maybe you could fake a
lot of other stuff, but not that.

Painter Joanna Boyce just after death, by
Rossetti, 1861

Yet I think back on some of
Dickinson’s earlier poems about death. Yes, I got impatient with her always
wanting to be there when people died so she could help their transition from
one energy phase to the next, but it was evident that she truly felt that the
journey after death was the greatest, grandest, most important journey ever.

In “A throe
upon the features,” Dickinson says that after the throe there is “An
ecstasy of parting.” It is as if a butterfly has fought its way out of a
cocoon. It is exhausting and perhaps painful, but then the beautiful thing is
free and airborn. Likewise, we all suffered in birth. The path from womb to tomb isn’t an easy one, yet it is essential.

And so in this poem I think
that Dickinson is making the point that great pain at death can bare the soul
to an honesty not easily attained in the day-to-day world. It is this level of
honesty that is most needed in the rebirth from mortal to immortal life.
Additionally, I think that Dickinson is saying that this honesty and mortal
death is somehow uplifting and beneficial to the observer. Yes, Virginia, there
is a bitter truth—perhaps a triumphant truth, but certainly the plain and
unavoidable reality of death. The deaths that come complete with convulsions
and agony simply make the point more clearly.

Still doubtful? Think about
Mel Gibson’s famous and acclaimed movie about the death of Jesus, The Passion of Christ. The movie was
also accused of being a sadistic wallowing in the agonies of death. Perhaps
Gibson was channeling a bit of Dickinson. I imagine that Dickinson had an image
of crucifixion in her mind, too, as she wrote this poem.

6 comments:

My own experience of an intimate, drawn out death helped me see the appropriateness of pretty much everything you say about the beads along the brow line. It was also very helpful to me at that time, kind of mystified by what all I felt, to recall a distinction between mere happiness and "joy." "Happiness" is of the surface; joy of the true depths, hence inevitably tinged by the presence of (make that awareness) of its opposite. Calling it an "ecstasy of parting" stretches it pretty far (poetic license?) so I'll go with "joy"--the awe and wonder at being present in a profoundly significant moment, honestly lived (and, I want to add, not requiring belief in a supernatural afterlife.

Thank you for this thoughtful comment. I suspect the Victorians would be prone to stretching such things a little far by our modern sensibilities; plus Dickinson has a taste for the Gothic – an aesthetic that can thrill at intimations of death and the macabre.

A poet friends with a new collection, "Oddly Beautiful," uses as an epigraph a sentence that may apply well to ED and which serves as a kind of correction to my own bent. It is this, from someone named Christian Wiman (sounds like a nom de plume if ever there were one): "It is the beauty of the world that makes us more conscious of death, not the consciousness of death that makes the world more beautiful."

Dickinson does reflect this insight -- it makes a lovely and concise way of expressing both her delving into death/after life and her sense that there is almost an overabundance of beauty and wonder in this life. However, I personally don't think it is an either/or proposition. Both are true, though one route may be less traveled by in this stage or that.

Maybe this reflects Dickinson's own experience with major depression and the agony that cannot be feigned. The agony before the ecstasy reflects the shifting emotional states of many great prophets and artists, in which case the agony preceding delivery to a higher state needs to be embraced as a profound part of the spiritual journey to reach sublime points of unity and the peace that transcends understanding. Agony enables entry into the divine realm.

Poem F 1038

Great Nature not to disappointAwaiting Her that Day —To be a Flower, is profoundResponsibility —

The Dickinson Blog Project

I plan to read and comment on all of Emily Dickinson's 1789 poems in chronological order. Scroll down to see earlier poems, or else browse the Archives. You can also use the Search function (below the Header). I think this is going to be a wonderful adventure!

I'm using R.W. Franklin's Reading Edition of the collected poems. I title the poems by the first line and at the end of the poem identify its Franklin number (e.g., F220) followed by the date Franklin assigns, and then by the numbers assigned by Thomas H. Johnson.